5th Year Adventures, Short Story 9, Echo at the World Tree
by PTMaskell
Summary: Timothy has brought the lost wizard to his home to help him on his path


It was near Christmas now. The long journey from the far-eastern reaches of Europe to the mountains of Greenland had been circuitous, and exhausting for all of us. My Antipodean Opaleye was not one for constant travel. She was a Zealander by birth, and hunting prey at low altitudes through ravines was her nature. Sensing danger at almost every point of rest had driven her to agitation, and near anger at times.

Riding her became near impossible in her current mood. I'd fashioned a secure harness for the side-satchel and had taken to stowing myself inside it along with Timothy. The satchel, the only bag I'd taken with me from my home in Normandy four and a half years ago when I'd left for Hogwarts had been enchanted to be much larger on the inside. I hadn't even covered the spells use in school to this day, but I'd been able to copy it from a crate given to me by an apothecary in Diagon Alley before hopping a broom to the Hogwarts Express. If it hadn't been charmed with the Undetectable Expansion spell there's no way I could have stowed my massive stores of potion-making ingredients with me. Some of those ingredients were still with me inside the satchel within cabinets and cupboards now.

While in flight I was able to sleep on the bed inside the satchel as well. The bed was the latest addition, as I'd used a collection of sturdy boughs, a live goose to transfigure them into something comfortable to rest on in my third year. Up until that point I had been sleeping at the desk, or not at all.

Two months had passed since I'd been forced to hide away all my possessions into this tiny bag, find my dear friend the Opaleye dragon upon whose back the satchel rode upon now, and leave Hogwarts School of Wizardry, my real home. It felt now like something out of a nightmare. Some unknown struggle had left me in possession of Headmistress McGonagall's wand, a Fir and Dragon Heartstring apparatus I'd known the business end of on several occasions; I wasn't a well-behaved student in my first year.

Instead of doing the sensible thing and taking it straight back to the Headmistress, I'd taken it to my personal laboratory: the unused classroom in the dungeons of Hogwarts, near the Slytherin Common Room and dormitories where I'd hidden from a werewolf the night of my sorting. However, before I'd even begun to figure out why this wand was separate from its owner, someone in what I now know to have been an invisibility cloak, and a damned good one at that, had attacked me, blowing up my lab table, and any feeling of safety I might have felt living at the school along with it. I never found the wand.

I left the school before the dust literally settled.

Using a secret passageway to a nearby mountain, I met with my dragon companion and together we'd left without looking back. Less than a week later we'd returned to my original home, Normandy France. The biggest mistake of the journey. What hadn't occurred to me, was that as an underage wizard, the rules of the Wizarding community stated I was not actually allowed to use magic outside of school until I came of age. It was one of the main reasons I'd returned to the school during summer holiday between my first and second years. Underage wizards were marked with a Trace by the Ministry of Magic.

Once there, my unseen attacker had easily followed me, and caught me in my sleep, taken my side-satchel, and destroyed my Portkeys, the magical objects I kept at all times for fast return to Hogwarts. Someone didn't want me getting back there. The person in the cloak had not been careful while rummaging around in my backup lab either. They'd thrown my cauldron aside, cracking it open. That wouldn't necessarily have been a problem, but I'd been disarmed during the battle, and my wand was left behind, burned to a crisp in the blaze of our escape.

It wasn't until we'd reached the Balkans, on a plateau of shimmering green and silver trees, resting in the cool mountain air that I'd resolved to stop focusing on what I'd lost, and start looking forward to how I'd take back control of my life. It was then that Timothy, my magical squirrel in his shining medieval armor and longsword had shown me a new path. On my map he somehow unveiled the location of a magical tree in the mountains of Greenland.

In the month since we'd been carefully navigating our way around civilization, both Muggle and Wizarding alike, keeping to forests, and flying either so low nobody could track us, or high over the clouds for the same reason. The altitude has proven too cold for me, and the air too thin to breathe. My time in the backup lab within the satchel had not been completely pointless. While I didn't have a wand, nor a Standard Type 2 Pewter Cauldron, I now found myself in possession of something so much better.

During a Portkey experiment gone wrong in my 1st Year I'd found myself in Fiji, on a Fire Crab reservation. Having recently studied them in Defense against the Dark Arts, I was so enthralled with the Crab-Turtle-Fire-Beasts I'd stolen two of them, and the entire cave they live in, and Encapsulated it into my side-satchel. They'd taken to scuttling around my backup lab when I wasn't around, but preferred the heat of their cave. That was four years ago. The original pair had bred, populating the cave with baby Crabs.

When I'd first examined the lab after losing my wand and my portkeys, I'd noticed a blockage. Since then I'd had time to investigate whilst flying Southwest over Albania toward the Mediterranean. It was the carcass of the original male Fire Crab. Old age had caught up with it, and it had died while struggling to exit the cave, as was their habit. It had grown so large it could no longer fit through the exit.

To understand why I was not all that upset over one of my pets dying, one must understand why Fire Crabs need a reservation to live on in the first place. For one, the International Statute of Secrecy that bound together the entire worldwide Wizarding world and kept it safe was in part keeping all magical beasts, creatures, and beings away from non-magical people at all times. Secondly, the adult Fire-Crab turtle-like shell was absolutely encrusted with oversized precious gems that themselves held great magical properties. The shell of the Fire Crab was the number one reason for their constant poaching: when hollowed out, combined with the gems, they made amazing no-fire Cauldrons. The gems could heat the shell to any temperature needed in seconds, or over time. No wand needed.

No part of the Fire Crab had been wasted, as every bit was good for potion-making. Each claw, leg, and even its fire-blaster had been carefully separated, jarred, and stowed away. The task had taken almost a whole day, keeping me merrily busy. Another day spent in the Fire Caves themselves harvesting the growing ingredients within was all the distraction I'd really afforded myself. Any time not spent re-reading my 1st through 5th Year school books, or the considerable library of magical tomes I'd accumulated over the years were spent brewing potions that didn't require a wand; a task that had proven my attention was slipping when I remembered too far into a mixture causing it to go to waste, and reminding me just how convenient a wand is for the cleanup afterward.

Oh well, one problem at a time.

The backup laboratory shook suddenly. The bag, and the dragon along with it, had landed. Timothy, my red squirrel suddenly stood upright from his little nest on a nearby bookshelf. He chittered for a moment, and sniffed the air. His tail whipped back and forth for a moment before sticking straight up, followed immediately by him launching himself straight off the shelf, gliding through the air, catching the corner of the ladder leading out of the satchel. Swinging around, he shot straight up and out of the entrance.

It had been a couple days since we'd made the long trip circumventing the United Kingdom from Spain to Iceland. My poor dragon had needed a whole days rest in an exceptionally lush field of tall grass, fragrant flowers, and wild boar. After hunting her fill, she'd roasted a large pile of the pigs and slept in the charred earth and bones. The melted stone had kept her warm to soothe her aching muscles.

Now, judging from the icy winds blowing in from the opening, we'd hopefully arrived at our destination.

I found myself hesitant.

With this part of the journey nearing completion, I was leading myself one step closer to going back home. Back toward danger. And in truth I still had absolutely no idea why we'd come here. Timothy's psychic message had simply been to go north. Here, to this place on the map he'd revealed using some unfamiliar form of magic.

I was trusting my life, my safety, and my future into the hands of a squirrel.

"My life is strange."

With that declaration, I grabbed my wizards robes, turned them inside out, an act that doubled their thickness, and revealed a layer of cold-resistant fur I'd slowly harvested over four years from the trimmings of another students pet kneazle which had been oddly willing to lend me its shavings.

Pulling the hood over my head, I set myself climbing out.

As I emerged from my enchanted side-satchel, I was momentarily blinded by a drift. The sting of the melting snow on my face, distracted me through closed eyes as I made my way out. Wiping the cold water from my eyes, I turned toward the dragon and unclasped the satchel from her spines, and slung it over my shoulder. She huffed her dislike of the cold both aloud, and in the back of my mindscape, a multi-colored spectrum of light that appeared in my minds eye that had formed when we'd first shared blood.

Once the bag that held basically all of my remaining worldly possessions was secure, I turned around to see where we'd landed.

Scanning around the immediate area, I saw no trace of Timothy. Drifting snow obscured my vision, and I could see nothing beyond 3 meters in any direction. I could tell it was mid-day, and I could tell there was a mountain surrounding me on all sides. From the vague light coming in, we were in the caldera of an ancient, massive volcano at an extreme altitude.

"Timothy!" I shouted into the storm, hoping if anything the sound of my voice would lead my intelligent little friend back to me in case the weather cost him his bearings. No sign of him though.

"Timothy.." came the echo off the caldera walls. Judging from the delay, this a huge mountain top.

The Opaleye dragon behind me growled low in her throat. A flash of red in the back of my mind told me she sensed danger nearby where I felt none. Whatever this place is, and whatever we were meant to do here, I needed to figure that out fast.

A blur of red appeared through the haze of the snow. Timothy was rushing back to me in a huge hurry. In his teeth he was carrying another branch. This would be the second souvenir he'd collected from one of our stops. Just before he was at my feet with his prize, he dropped it and bounded through the air, onto my leg, up my side, and down into the satchel he vanished.

Was he expecting me to help him stow it away like I had last time?

I really hope we didn't just spend a month travelling to the northernmost tip of the world so a magic squirrel could collect a stick.

The whirling of the snow around me had intensified in sound slightly, and a familiar, but new tingling of danger was beginning to prick the back of my neck. This trip was going to be cut short soon. And I was running out of reasons to stay. Dragons hate the cold, I have no particular fondness for massive amounts of snow, and aside from being inside a dead volcano, I literally could see no reason to be here.

The growling of my Opaleye companion was slowly beginning to intensify and echo.

I felt a slight nudge at my side, looking down I saw Timothy struggling to pull something from inside the satchel out. It was the first stick, the silvery-green one from the Balkans mountains in southeastern Europe.

Turning the stick on its side, I pulled it out for him. And that's when I finally noticed that it wasn't quite green. It was lime. This was a piece of a Silver Lime tree, a wood used in wandmaking. A shiver ran down my spine, and not from the cold. Reaching down I retrieved the other stick Timothy had brought me. It was made of a remarkably pale wood, but the weight, feel, and look of it was that of Ash. It had the most odd shape, it was twisted around itself with three whorls that had hollowed out. Turning it lengthwise, I looked down the center of the branch and saw it had a near perfect opening from base to tip through the whorls.

Just enough space for the Silver Lime stick. Timothy was trying to make me a new wand!

My mind raced. The only thing left that I would need was a core. Dragon Heartstring made the best cores for my academic studies, but I wasn't a wandmaker. I had only a rudimentary knowledge of how to construct a wand, and I neither had, nor had he brought me anything to use as a core.

Timothy had been watching me. He stood on his hind legs, his polished armor shining brightly in the mid-day sun and white snow. Holding onto both branches, I looked down at him slightly confused. I could definitely see my pet and friend in front of me, standing all of 8 inches high, but he somehow felt so much larger right now.

What was this that I was feeling? Life force? Energy? An aura? Timothy felt as if he dwarfed over me at this moment. His body before me was beginning to feel more like the illusion. Timothy wasn't small. No, he never was. How could I have been so blind to it?

Blinking slightly, I opened my eyes, truly opened them to the truth, and saw my companion for what I felt I always knew he'd been, but was fooled into seeing something small and helpless.

Hulking over me was my true friend, as I'd always known him to be: A behemoth of a white and grey mythological being only resembling a squirrel. He had a strong, muscular body with long, thin, sharp claws for grasping wood strongly, but without causing it harm. Thick fur to protect from the cold of the thin, northern air, and most astonishingly, a massive tusk, or horn jutting from his forehead.

"ég er Ratataskr," Timothy informed me, revealing his true name.

"Tími er stutter, vinur minn (Time is short, my friend),"

"Hættan er nálægt og það er mikið að gera (Danger is near and there is much to do)."

I couldn't agree more. An invisible wizard of exceptional skill and likely experience was hunting me across the continent, and I was out of options.

The air was clearing, and the snowstorm had begun to dissipate. Behind Ratatoskr a great, white tree was coming into view. Clear into the sky it reached until it ended with a rainbow as it touched beyond my ability to see.

But he was right. I think I knew what I need to do.

I sat in the snow, which suddenly did not feel cold at all. Somewhere in the back of my mind I no longer believed it had been snow at all.

Ratataskr held up one of his long claws and held it up to the massive whiskers on his face. Nimbly he cut one off, and offered it to me.

I closed my eyes, and focused my will harder than I had ever done before. Opening a different eye, I saw my hands as I held them up before me. First I set aside the pale ash branch that glowed with an unfamiliar energy that matched the tree that touched the heavens. Holding my hands open and flat I held the Silver Lime branch into focus, and felt it levitate off my palms. Without cracking or breaking, I envisioned the threads of the wood open up and expand as if the very material itself had been made to expand like putty. With a turn of my index finger, I took the whisker from the Great Tusked One and slid it into the center of the Silver Lime branch. Once it was within, I allowed the threads of the wood to come back together, only now they housed the whisker of one of my closest companions and most ancient of beings left in the world, the Ratataskr, messenger of the gods.

Keeping focus, I levitated the branch from the tree, that I now knew to be the Yggdrasil of legend, and slide the cored Silver Lime branch into its narrow whorled openings. I reached out with my mind into the life spirit of the ash, and humbling asked it to grow and twist, and tighten around the Liver Lime. This pleased the ash, and I felt its respect and loyalty to my being as it came to life, and wrapped itself around the cored center.

Opening my physical eyes, I saw a new wand before them. My will, and the will of the spirit of the woods within held it in mid-air.

But the question burned, just because I had built it, did that mean it was mine?

The wand chooses the wizard. That's what Ollivander said, and that was what every entry on wandlore said. Ollivander, and every wandmaker throughout history had constructed a totaled millions of wands that were never loyal to their maker.

There was no time to waste. It was near, and it had to be silenced.

My own thoughts were no longer a curiosity to myself. I was sure of what I was feeling.

Reaching out, I grasped the handle.

A wave of energy pulsed from within to my very core. Heat burst from my hand, and enveloped my being, all the way to the tip of my toes. I felt a connection to this wand like I'd never done with my old Aspen, dragon heartstring wand: I had been brash and combatative in my youth, I realized that now. I'd evolved since then. Not just matured, but had grown as a person.

My physical eyes had been opened, but as the new wand touched me to my own core, I felt another eye open as well, the one I'd used to construct the wand. The one I'd been using to see through Timothy, or the Opaleyes for the last four years.

Everything around me changed in that moment: There was no snow. There never had been. It had been an illusion to protect this place from Muggles, and Wizards alike. Old magic, used by a race of beings who'd long since gone from Midgard but had endured in absoluteness and intensity for thousands of years after their departure. The caldera around me was in fact lush, grassy, and warm. Sun poured in from between the branches of Yggdrasil, my breath slowed, and I breathed in the fresh warm air.

Breathing it out with a satisfied sigh, it caught in my throat as I heard myself sigh again a split second later.

What had I sworn to myself about ignoring my instincts?

The constant growling of my Antipodean Opaleye was reverberating around me, and echoing back. But I knew better now. The mountain walls were enchanted, sound couldn't bounce off them.

There was an echo where one couldn't exist.

Searching for just a moment, I saw it. At first I could have sworn it was a Boggart. The air around it swirled like a Boggart, only it didn't take on a new shape. A vague shifting of light, as if a shoddily made invisibility cloak were flapping in an unseen wind seemed to rotate from a central spot as it hovered in the air. I realized now this shimmering had been nearby the whole time, and it was in the exact direction of every repeated sound I'd heard. This unmistakably magical creature was the source of the danger I'd been feeling, and the source of the repeated growling now.

No book I'd read had contained such a creature.

Perhaps the old gods left it here to defend the tree.

"Þeir gerðu (They did)," came the bold voice of Ratatoskr.

"Þú verður að þegja það fljótt eða þú munt deyja (You must silence it quickly or you will die),"

Both my highly literal, and quirky natures agreed with my instincts all at once.

Nodding silently, I held up my new wand, I flicked it left drawing the bottom half a circle, then slashed downward at the Echo and screamed the word in my mind, 'SILENCIO!'

The spell lashed through the air invisibly and struck the Echo dead center. A skirmish of light twisted the creature inward. Without making a sound, a small puff of smoke dissipated where I'd hit it, and I knew in an instant that it was no more.

I let out the breath I'd been holding. The sound didn't repeat itself. And the tingling feeling in the back of my neck was gone.

Reaching out, I touched the ear of my Antipodean Opaleye. She blinked for a moment before looking around startled. She'd still been under the ancient enchantment. Shaking off the cold for the warmth, she took in the new surroundings with the wide wonder I'd felt the first time I'd seen it.

I felt a light weight on my shoulder.

Turning I grinned. Timothy, my little red squirrel had once again taken on the form he knew I felt the most love toward even though Ratataskr was within his realm and could be himself freely, he'd chosen to just be my friend for the time being.

It would be nice to just stay here, and just be safe for a time.

But I absolutely knew that would be impossible. Our pursuer was no more than a day away, and his skills and tenacity made him just dangerous enough to find us. Even here.

'I'll save him,' I thought to myself.

'It's the least I could do. I wouldn't have a school, or even have known the magical world at all if it hadn't been for Harry Potter.'


End file.
